I have been “mistaken,” “misled,” “misrepresented,” and been “unaccountably in error,”
and am sorry if you have been offended

Friday, May 24, 2013

A Kohno/Murayama-Abe-Hashimoto Dialogue

The following exchange took place between me and a
Chinese analyst over the working week, edited for typos and augmented for
clarity. I (think I) have his consent in reproducing his end.

1. “Just wondering what's your comment on
Hashimoto, the Osaka Mayor's remakrs regarding the issue of ‘comfort women.’ I
have a particular question on the possible consequences of politicians who
delivers reckless remarks. If Mr. Hashimoto was a German politician, I assumed
he'd already resigned from his post.

“But obviously he's blaming people for
their lack of understanding or ability to understand what he meant. In
this sense, are Japanese public more tolerant than in other countries to their
public figures?”

If he were a cabinet
minister, yes, I'm sure that he would have been forced to resign. But he's a
mayor, and I'm sure local elected officials have said/done worse things
unrelated to their job description and stayed on. The political damage has been
done, though, and the Your Party has decided to break off cooperation with the
Japan Restoration Party in the July upper house election, much to the delight
of the DPJ

There a genuine need
for an open debate on the where and what regarding the role of the Japanese
government/military regarding the sexual demands of male soldiers and how all
that compared to the other governments/military forces. But Hashimoto chose the
wrong place and wrong interlocutors for his message--Hashimoto himself was also
the wrong person to raise the issue.

A public figure must
expect to have his words framed in a context not of his choosing.

Does that help?

2. “For an outsider like me, I'd assume
that with the 1995 Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama remarks on the comfort
women issue, we turned a page of history. Why is [it necessary] to revisit that
part of history, bearing in mind that it's a sensitive issue to Korea and
China?”

Let me give you the
short version of my answer to an ever so slightly different question, namely: Why
do Japanese politicians keep revisiting that part of history, bearing in mind
that it's a sensitive issue to Korea and China?

First of all, there are
two statements: the Kohno statement, which addressed the comfort women issue,
and the Murayama statement, which addressed the Japanese war of aggression.
Most Japanese politicians who have looked into the first issue as well as much
of the Japanese mainstream media believe that the Kohno statement is not based
on good evidence and is at best highly misleading. (I happen to agree with them
regard to the women from the Japanese archipelago, the Korean Peninsula and
Taiwan (who were all at the time Japanese citizens) but disagree with some of
them with regard to the women in the areas of China and Southeast Asia that
were occupied by the Japanese military. I’ll leave it at that for now.) They
believe that South Koreans and the Korean-Americans have, with the complicity
of the leftwing media in Japan, managed to whitewash the true history of the
Korean comfort women as part of its national myth at the expense of Japan. They
hold plenty of frustration inside, which sometimes boils over when they are
prodded by reporters and Diet members. The outcome is always disappointing for
them, which generates more frustration in a vicious cycle.

The Murayama statement
is a different animal. Only people on the rightwing fringe (I hope) fail to see
the post-1937 war in China terms of aggression. A slightly larger (but still
small) number probably fail to see the post-1931 establishment of Manchuria as
aggression. However, the 1894-95 Sino-Japanese War and the 1904-05
Russo-Japanese War are seen in a very different light by most Japanese.
Specifically, they were wars fought between regional powers in a Hobbsian era
of global imperialism, regional powers who were widely assumed to have
militaries superior to that of contemporary Japan. The Chinese, no doubt, would
frame it against the backdrop of the Opium War and other erosion of Chinese
sovereignty by the Western powers, whose worldview the Japanese leadership
seemingly adopted wholesale. As for Korea, the Koreans tell a story of a proud,
independent nation subjugated by its longtime cultural (if not political)
subordinate. The Japanese view is less clear, but there’s probably a large
segment of the Japanese body politic that sees it this way: There was a dynasty
ruling over a largely illiterate caste-ridden society complete with hereditary
slaves and it was either us or the Russians. Yes, this sounds like the
unedifying “everybody was doing it” defense. But have the Dutch apologized to
the Indonesians? The British to the Burmese? The Americans to the Filipinos? The
list goes on. So the story looks very different in the rest of Asia,
explaining, perhaps, why they like us so much there. Does all this mean that
the Murayama statement is wrong? No, but the commentary looks very different
from the Chinese and Korean perspectives—as well as the American’s, which
basically looks at its war in the Pacific through the Pearl Harbor perspective.

My take is that every
nation will have its own national myth, not to the likings of others, perhaps,
but not to be bent to their will either. If my advice had any currency, it
would be: Never mind what they say; keep an eye on what they do.

“Polls show a majority of people are
against Hashimoto's remarks. But he said there' s a problem with the polling
method. If we take a look at the political elite group in Japan, how much
support can Hashimoto count on? He's once considered a candidate for future PM,
does the comfort women issue damage his chances?”

The other conservative
parties (as well as some prospective JRP candidates) are avoiding him like the
plague. I don’t think that he can fully recover from this reverse in his
political fortunes in the foreseeable future. But then, the future is
notoriously hard to foresee.

“People in Korea and China will naturally
respond with concern over remarks like this in the sense that history will
repeat itself in which Japan will impose its will on neighboring countries. I
know it's an overestimated feeling toward the conservatives (so-called) in
Japan. But people do have a concern there. Besides the comfort women
issue, you have Prime Minister Abe's talk of "aggression" not being
defined and his wearing a military uniform at an electoral event last month,
among other controversial choices.”

Abe was wrong in one
sense about the lack of consensus on the meaning of “aggression.” There’s a
unanimous 1974 UN resolution on the definition of the term. The problem, of
course, is in its application, and when did the opposing parties in any
conflict ever end up in agreement? Ask the Turks and Armenians. The Israelis
and Palestinians. The Mexicans and Americans. The Spaniards and Americans. The
Filipinos and Americans. The Hawaiians and Americans. The Native Americans and
Americans… The list goes on. Then ask, how do these differences in
understanding affect the here-and-now, and the future? Do the Chinese and
Koreans believe that the Japanese are willing and able to change the status quo
by force? If so, that says more about them than it says about the Japanese in
my view. Otherwise, be happy that Abe has reconfirmed the Japanese government’s
commitment to those two statements. Did he want to? Probably not. But that’s
the point. Isn’t confirmation by an unwilling prime minister worth far more
than one from a willing one?

“How do people view that kind of gestures?”

Depends on the
individual. “Comfort women” comments have far more negative domestic currency
than those parsing “aggression.” BTW I was surprised that “aggression”=侵略. I had always assumed that it was “invasion”=侵略.

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About Me

After graduation, Jun Okumura promptly entered what is now the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and stayed in in its ecosystem most of his “adult” life. Along the way, he had pleasant stops in an assortment of Japanese quangos (Japangos?), overseas assignments and government agencies. After thirty years, though, it dawned on him that he had no aptitude whatsoever for administration and/or management. Armed with this epiphany, he went to the authorities and arranged an amicable separation; to come out, as it were. He is completely on his own IYKWIAS, but he and the METI folks remain “good friends.” He currently holds the titles of “visiting researcher” at the Meiji Institute for Global Affairs (no, that MIGA) and counselor at a risk analysis firm that dares not speak its name. This gives him plenty of time to blog or make money on his own. His bank account says that he does too much of the first, and insists that he do more of what he calls “intellectual odd jobs”. He wants to be paid to write fulltime, or better, talk—where the easy money is—but that distinction has largely escaped him. He really should not be referring to himself in the third person; he is not that famous.